John Reid, a balloon artist from New York, built the world’s largest balloon sculpture (made by a single person) last Friday. He got to work on Thursday morning at the Salt Lake Comic Con FanXperience event and spent the next several hours inflating thousands of colored balloons at his booth.

42 hours later he had put together a 50-foot tall Transformers robot, ‘Poptimus’ Prime, using 4,302 purple, green, white, black and gray balloons. It was so tall that it actually couldn’t fit upright in the convention center. Reid and 10 other volunteers had to struggle a bit to bring it into a kneeling position. The robot is said to be invincible, except for one weakness – needles!

Photo: Epic Balloons/Facebook

After the project was complete, Reid said that he was ‘super overwhelmed’. “I’m really proud and really happy that my friends pushed me harder than I thought I could do,” he said. He created a time lapse video of the making of the robot that he will submit to Guinness World Records so they can verify his work. It will take up to three months before his record is confirmed. But in the meantime, representatives from Record Holders Republic did confirm that the structure was the largest of its kind to be created by a single person.

Photo: Epic Balloons/Facebook

Reid has been working with balloons for the past 20 years, ever since he was 16 years old. When he started out, he knew how to make ‘142 animals that looked like a dog’. But he’s come a long way since then, moving on to bigger and better accomplishments. And the nice thing about him is that he hopes another artist will come along and outdo his work. “I want to hold the record for like three or four months,” he said. I hope that somebody else decides to try to take this art a little further and crush me. Trounce me. Wipe the floor with me.”

Photo: Epic Balloons/Facebook

“I would be honored to have somebody make something even more epic than this.” That’s the spirit!